The Politics of the Encounter

Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization

Andy Merrifield

Publication Year: 2013

The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to our planet since 1970, when Lefebvre's seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris.

We need to think less of cities as "entities with borders and clear demarcations between what's inside and what's outside" and emphasize instead the effects of "planetary urbanization," a concept of Lefebvre's that Merrifield makes relevant for the ways we now experience the urban. The city—from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street—seems to be the critical zone in which a new social protest is unfolding, yet dissenters' aspirations are transcending the scale of the city physically and philosophically. Consequently, we must shift our perspective from "the right to the city" to "the politics of the encounter," says Merrifield. We must ask how revolutionary crowds form, where they draw their energies from, what kind of spaces they occur in—and what kind of new spaces they produce.

Title Page, Series Page, Copyright, Dedication, Quotes

CONTENTS

PREFACE: The Personal and the Political: A Different Kind of Blue

The late Herbert Muschamp, onetime columnist at the New York Times, once
suggested my and Henri Lefebvre’s work on the city sprang from a variation of
what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein called “the depressive position.” Muschamp
was one of America’s most infl uential (and controversial) architectural critics,
a brilliant, exuberant urban commentator, a chip off Lefebvre’s own block. He
and I became friends in 2002, around the time of the publication of my books...

CHAPTER ONE: The Final Frontier: Planetary Urbanization

Near the beginning of the “Perspective ou prospective?” chapter of Le droit
à la ville, the Marxist urban studies godfather, Henri Lefebvre, alludes to the
godfather of science fi ction, Isaac Asimov. The comment is barely a paragraph
long and Lefebvre doesn’t elaborate. Yet even in its brevity Lefebvre’s remark
is intriguing, and it has intrigued me for a while now. In this opening chapter,....

CHAPTER TWO: Here Comes Everybody: Problematizing the Right to the City

It’s in James Joyce’s dazzlingly inventive masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, published
on the brink of World War II, where the acronym “HCE” first enters the
scene, coined aft er the book’s antihero, a certain Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker,
barkeep and man of the world. Throughout Finnegans Wake, Joyce puns
and plays with H. C. Earwicker, whose dreaming mind becomes the psychological...

CHAPTER THREE: The Urban Consolidates: Centrality and Citizenship

The city in history established itself from the cradle of absolute space, developed
as an internal force that needed to expand and push outward in order
to augment its power. The city in history has modifi ed and been modifi ed by
successive modes of production, by advances in social and technical relations
of production. Under capitalism, the city became the center of gravity; a whole...

CHAPTER FOUR: The Politics of the Encounter

Some of the best and profoundest lines ever written about “the encounter” are
Louis Althusser’s, done in the 1980s, during the fi nal, troubled decade of his life.
At fi rst blush, these “later writings” seem to be a direct refutation of his earlier,
famous (and infamous) structural Marxism of the 1960s, brilliantly voiced in
texts like For Marx and Reading Capital; they seem to express Althusser’s own...

CHAPTER FIVE: The Planetary Urbanization of Nonwork

In 1968, in The Right to the City, Lefebvre said that the right to the city was
a “cry and demand” for city life. Two years on, in The Urban Revolution, he
said we should no longer think about cities but about “urban society.” Then
two years on again, in La pensée marxiste et la ville, he’s back not only using
the term “city” but also using it with a new twist, making the claim we’ve just...

CHAPTER SIX: Revolutionary Rehearsals?

The spark that triggers any irruptive, swerving encounter is like that first Jackson
Pollock drip: suddenly the paint falls onto the giant canvas; things explode
at ground level, on the floor, in the street; dense skeins of black and white swirls
disrupt the field of vision; brown and silver nebulae dazzle; paint is layered on
swiftly, like meteorites flashing across a white void. There’s neither beginning
nor end here; entering is via some middle door, with no meaning other than...

CHAPTER SEVEN: Imaginary Pragmatics and the Enigma of Revolt

To celebrate our becoming a minority, and to posit an almost-unimaginable parallel
urban realm, only opens the door, likely a backdoor, to the faint possibility
that there is an imaginary parallel urban realm out there, one yearning to be
invented.1 In any flight through the wormhole to another political space-time
dimension, into a minor space, physicists will tell you that enormous amounts
of negative energy are required to force that hole open, to keep it open, and to ...

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